Anyone else educated by FCPS and sees the decline?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One data point:

My child in Honors 9th grade English at Langley is reading an abridged version of the Odyssey. It’s about 1/3 the length of the original book and the language is simplified.

I read the full book when I was in 9th grade in FCPS and her older cousin also read the full book about 10 years ago in another FCPS high school.

Wow! My 6th grader is reading 2 versions of the Odyssey. She's reading the long version I read in highschool and a graphic novel. She has to write a compare and contrast essay. She's in a private episcopal school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the education of my oldest who has graduated in high school and was in AAP since 3rd grade has been much better what I received in the 1990s. We did no tutoring and ended up at a T25 university in a demanding major and doing well.

The education of my younger child who is 8 years behind her sibling and not in AAP has been a joke. No writing instruction in our McLean ES and her math class is only 20 mins a day and in a class of 30 kids. No homework is given. The disrupted weeks of school w/o 5 days do not help. She scored borderline for reading/math intervention on the Fall VGAs, so missed out on getting extra help at school. After hearing from her principal that she was doing much better than her peers and that I should not worry, I was done. We started supplementing with a private writing tutor and daily math practice at home using a textbook. I also stopped volunteering at school entirely since that the school does not welcome the presence of parents. It is clear that academics especially for general education students is not a priority at our ES.

I’m hoping that the honors classes in MS will be step up, but not holding my breath.

My advice to parents who have students in FCPS is to build into your budget a tutoring line item of $300-$600 per month during the school year. Just do it. Think about it as an assessment on your property taxes or something, but don’t fail your child by thinking FCPS will take care of their education.

Or just send them to private.

We pay more and get a heck of a lot more out if it, including family time because we don't need tutoring. My kids score above the 95% across the board on national standardized tests. They also do sports and clubs at school during the day. In ES maybe they have 15 min of homework a night, middleschool is a bit more, maybe 30 min to 1hr.

Most private kids have tutors too. No familiy time and money saved.

Mine doesn’t. She’s doing really, really well.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I care enough to compensate for the general decline in my kids education. This will result in a larger gap between them and their peers who relied on public education alone. Many folks were doing this anyway. The gap is just going to grow larger.

How do you compensate? I feel like the biggest gap is writing.

You don’t learn how to write until grad school.

They don't have to learn with chat gpt

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the education of my oldest who has graduated in high school and was in AAP since 3rd grade has been much better what I received in the 1990s. We did no tutoring and ended up at a T25 university in a demanding major and doing well.

The education of my younger child who is 8 years behind her sibling and not in AAP has been a joke. No writing instruction in our McLean ES and her math class is only 20 mins a day and in a class of 30 kids. No homework is given. The disrupted weeks of school w/o 5 days do not help. She scored borderline for reading/math intervention on the Fall VGAs, so missed out on getting extra help at school. After hearing from her principal that she was doing much better than her peers and that I should not worry, I was done. We started supplementing with a private writing tutor and daily math practice at home using a textbook. I also stopped volunteering at school entirely since that the school does not welcome the presence of parents. It is clear that academics especially for general education students is not a priority at our ES.

I’m hoping that the honors classes in MS will be step up, but not holding my breath.

My advice to parents who have students in FCPS is to build into your budget a tutoring line item of $300-$600 per month during the school year. Just do it. Think about it as an assessment on your property taxes or something, but don’t fail your child by thinking FCPS will take care of their education.

Or just send them to private.

We pay more and get a heck of a lot more out if it, including family time because we don't need tutoring. My kids score above the 95% across the board on national standardized tests. They also do sports and clubs at school during the day. In ES maybe they have 15 min of homework a night, middleschool is a bit more, maybe 30 min to 1hr.

Most private kids have tutors too. No familiy time and money saved.

This is not true. We do private and few of their friends but not many have tutors.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am beginning to welcome our new equity overloads. As standards continue to lower, my kids, with our support, will continue to distance themselves.

Parents who didn’t care enough to support their kids during inequitable times will continue to not care and those in the middle will just get dumber.

I can fill in the gaps for my kids and know they will be ok academically. But I do not welcome a dumber society bc it impacts all of us. Dumb people vote.

They already are.

The US is really sliding with regard to standards. Until everyone wants to stop pushing fingers and actually do the work to raise their kids and hold them acountable at school and actually have regular practice and assessments and not just these open ended projects, I see no send in site. Homework does not need to account for much but it should account for something and serve as practice for students. Tests serve as assessments of mastery. Projects serve as exploratory. They all serve a purpose.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I care enough to compensate for the general decline in my kids education. This will result in a larger gap between them and their peers who relied on public education alone. Many folks were doing this anyway. The gap is just going to grow larger.

How do you compensate? I feel like the biggest gap is writing.

You don’t learn how to write until grad school.

I learned to write well in at a Catholic HS which isn’t an option for my kids. Does IB help kids learn how to write?

IB is your best option. If you care about APs and UVA admissions, some might disagree, but if you want a well rounded education, IB is the closest thing.

+1. This board is obsessed with improving literacy. But when presented with a rigorous program like IB that requires heavy amounts of reading and writing, they withdraw their enthusiasm for literacy in favor of AP classes that allegedly are less time-consuming. So do they actually want their kids to put the hard work into reading and writing or not?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
I'd also point out that, in response to someone's comment about reading an abridged version of the Odyssey, this happened at both a public AND private school that I attended in the 90s, so this is not new unless you classify the mid-90s as "new."

+1

I read the abridged version in the 90s also, as did my freshman in Honors English 9 at a Catholic high school this year. There's only so much time in the school year and it's just one of multiple books they have to get through and take tests on, write essays, do character analysis, etc. I assume honors in public is the same. I don't think this one example is a sign of decline, more that the teacher has to make tradeoffs for how they want to allocate instructional time.

Her younger siblings want to go to Robinson for IB instead of a Catholic school so I'll be able to respond back with a direct comparison in a few years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I care enough to compensate for the general decline in my kids education. This will result in a larger gap between them and their peers who relied on public education alone. Many folks were doing this anyway. The gap is just going to grow larger.

How do you compensate? I feel like the biggest gap is writing.

You don’t learn how to write until grad school.

Speak for yourself. I learned to write during high school. By the time I got to college, the expectation was that we knew how to write. As for grad school: no one at UChicago was going to teach PhD candidates how to write.

No I’ll speak for the hundreds of undergrads and graduates that I’ve thought. And all the undergrads were just like you, so sure they knew how to write, only a small fraction actually knew how to. But we are talking technical and scientific writing, not the width washy touchy feet stuff you probably do

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s all about One Fairfax, which is a race to the bottom engineered by politicians like Jeff McKay and Karen Keys Gamarra.

Oh please. One Fairfax has been all talk. There has been no action at all as far as FCPS being treated as "one." Poor schools are literally poorer than they ever have been now reaching record concentrations of 60%+ FARMs. If you're unhappy with your wealthy pyramid, that's all on you.

This.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think the older generations are always doom and gloom about school. My dad is livid that kids aren't learning cursive anymore. I couldn't be happier that it's gone.

I understand the suspicion of quality of snippets, materials cobbled together from online sources, etc., but the reality is that with electronic media there is often no reason to have a textbook. As a college professor, I have moved in the last 15 years from relying primarily on a very popular textbook to teaching my class without a textbook. I've read all 8 or so well-known textbooks in the field and I feel that, through powerpoints and assigned brief readings, I am able to outperform any textbook on the topic (students seem to agree). There is no benefit to reading a 50 page chapter in a bloated book that gets key principles incorrect or has not been updated to reflect changing theories or evidence.

I'd also point out that, in response to someone's comment about reading an abridged version of the Odyssey, this happened at both a public AND private school that I attended in the 90s, so this is not new unless you classify the mid-90s as "new."

Finally, while I have been skeptical of the changes to learning, I don't observe that my oldest son is behind where I and my peers were (in an advanced program) in terms of reading, writing, and math. It seems that students can learn to spell and write without memorizing vocabulary/spelling lists for hours every month. I say this is a wonderful development.

I am not sure what field you are in, but as a Humanities professor, I can say that a shocking number of students these days are extremely weak writers. The lack of explicitly grammar and writing instruction has had a profound effect. Yes, some kids can learn to spell simply by reading but many cannot. And I would argue that most kids cannot earn to write well without being taught. Writing instruction should be organized and systematic and start at the elementary level. I personally don't care about cursive or even much about neatness but teaching grammar, vocabulary, how to construct a sentence, then a paragraph-these are very basic building blocks. Putting a blank paper in front of a third grader, handing him a rubric, and saying it's poetry week is not teaching writing!

I can believe that you may be able to outperform all of the available textbooks, but can all the teachers?? Of course, not. Also, there used to be a value to having a text to go back to and reread, even if it was just s to have all the formulas in one place, all the dates easily accessible, all the verb forms and tenses well-organized. I don't know how kids study these days.

I wasn't educated in FCPS-I went to a private school in Massachusetts. But the education I received was immeasurably superior. The demands were greater, the expectations higher. To give a silly example, my highschooler in honors history has taken only multiple choice tests this year. What a waste of an opportunity to teach a kid to think and write critically, in addition to learn the material. Of course it's a lot easier to correct multiple choice and if you have 30 plus kids in every class, you do what you can to survive.

[Anonymous]

I graduated from Fairfax County schools. I'm a liberal Democrat. I agree the teaching has gone down hill. On the
Right you have crazy parents complaining about stupid shit like CRT and book banning. On the left you have crazy parents complaining about equity and renaming everything and disassembling AAP/TJ. The kids in the middle suffer because of this nonsense. Period. We pay way too much in taxes to get so little from our schools. I don't blame the teachers who are doing their best. But parents, administrators, the school board are ALL at fault.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I care enough to compensate for the general decline in my kids education. This will result in a larger gap between them and their peers who relied on public education alone. Many folks were doing this anyway. The gap is just going to grow larger.

How do you compensate? I feel like the biggest gap is writing.

You don’t learn how to write until grad school.

Speak for yourself. I learned to write during high school. By the time I got to college, the expectation was that we knew how to write. As for grad school: no one at UChicago was going to teach PhD candidates how to write.

No I’ll speak for the hundreds of undergrads and graduates that I’ve thought. And all the undergrads were just like you, so sure they knew how to write, only a small fraction actually knew how to. But we are talking technical and scientific writing, not the width washy touchy feet stuff you probably do

Ah yes — someone who hates the humanities and social sciences. What a shame that you appear to be a professor.

[Anonymous]

Oh and I graduated from Georgetown SFS with a 3.85. I completed 2 theses, including one for honors in my major. But sure — I didn’t know how to write.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the older generations are always doom and gloom about school. My dad is livid that kids aren't learning cursive anymore. I couldn't be happier that it's gone.

I understand the suspicion of quality of snippets, materials cobbled together from online sources, etc., but the reality is that with electronic media there is often no reason to have a textbook. As a college professor, I have moved in the last 15 years from relying primarily on a very popular textbook to teaching my class without a textbook. I've read all 8 or so well-known textbooks in the field and I feel that, through powerpoints and assigned brief readings, I am able to outperform any textbook on the topic (students seem to agree). There is no benefit to reading a 50 page chapter in a bloated book that gets key principles incorrect or has not been updated to reflect changing theories or evidence.

I'd also point out that, in response to someone's comment about reading an abridged version of the Odyssey, this happened at both a public AND private school that I attended in the 90s, so this is not new unless you classify the mid-90s as "new."

Finally, while I have been skeptical of the changes to learning, I don't observe that my oldest son is behind where I and my peers were (in an advanced program) in terms of reading, writing, and math. It seems that students can learn to spell and write without memorizing vocabulary/spelling lists for hours every month. I say this is a wonderful development.

I am not sure what field you are in, but as a Humanities professor, I can say that a shocking number of students these days are extremely weak writers. The lack of explicitly grammar and writing instruction has had a profound effect. Yes, some kids can learn to spell simply by reading but many cannot. And I would argue that most kids cannot earn to write well without being taught. Writing instruction should be organized and systematic and start at the elementary level. I personally don't care about cursive or even much about neatness but teaching grammar, vocabulary, how to construct a sentence, then a paragraph-these are very basic building blocks. Putting a blank paper in front of a third grader, handing him a rubric, and saying it's poetry week is not teaching writing!

I can believe that you may be able to outperform all of the available textbooks, but can all the teachers?? Of course, not. Also, there used to be a value to having a text to go back to and reread, even if it was just s to have all the formulas in one place, all the dates easily accessible, all the verb forms and tenses well-organized. I don't know how kids study these days.

I wasn't educated in FCPS-I went to a private school in Massachusetts. But the education I received was immeasurably superior. The demands were greater, the expectations higher. To give a silly example, my highschooler in honors history has taken only multiple choice tests this year. What a waste of an opportunity to teach a kid to think and write critically, in addition to learn the material. Of course it's a lot easier to correct multiple choice and if you have 30 plus kids in every class, you do what you can to survive.

Exactly this. Some teachers are extraordinary but the vast majority are preparing random worksheets/slides. Textbooks helped even the playing field so even the weakest teacher could teach a class adequately. I for one could rarely follow the lectures in school. I always read the textbooks before/after.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I graduated from Fairfax County schools. I'm a liberal Democrat. I agree the teaching has gone down hill. On the
Right you have crazy parents complaining about stupid shit like CRT and book banning. On the left you have crazy parents complaining about equity and renaming everything and disassembling AAP/TJ. The kids in the middle suffer because of this nonsense. Period. We pay way too much in taxes to get so little from our schools. I don't blame the teachers who are doing their best. But parents, administrators, the school board are ALL at fault.

I wouldn’t say teachers are blameless. Most of this equity push is overcorrection. People are trying to overcompensate for the sins of the past and the consequences they caused others. If previous generations of teachers hadn’t been so biased and hateful against students with disabilities and minorities, folks wouldnt be demanding so much oversight and accountability now to overcompensate. It’s like when Trump got elected and all the liberals ran out of their minds to the far far left. Hopefully soon we’ll settle down somewhere in the middle.